Citrix XenServer Product Overview

Citrix
XenServer
Industry-leading open source
platform for cost-effective cloud,
server and desktop virtualization.

citrix.com
Citrix XenServer Product Overview 2

While the core server virtualization market has

matured, virtualization itself is seeing continued
innovation and momentum in the growing cloud
market where enterprises and service providers are
building private and public clouds. Citrix XenServer
and the Linux Foundation Xen Project™ already
power many of the world’s largest clouds and are
quickly becoming the de facto standard for cloud
infrastructures. To meet these new demands,
XenServer has undergone a platform modernization
for maximum horizontal scalability and increased
performance, density, flexibility and cloud readiness.

Citrix is focused on delivering the best possible virtualization platform for cloud
builders and providing customers a seamless path to the cloud. To accelerate this
mission, XenServer is available as a fully open source package to ensure a strong
platform, a vibrant ecosystem and a community of users who are collaborating
toward this common goal. The net result is a better XenServer product that
benefits all customer use cases—cloud, server or desktop—in any datacenter
type, cloud or traditional.

XenServer
Industry-leading open source virtualization platform
A value leader in the virtualization space, XenServer is an open source platform for
cloud, server and desktop virtualization infrastructures. Organizations of any size
can install XenServer in less than 10 minutes to virtualize even the most demanding
workloads and automate management processes, thereby increasing IT flexibility
and agility and lowering TCO. With a rich set of management and automation
capabilities, a simple and affordable pricing model and optimizations for virtual
desktops and cloud computing, XenServer is designed to optimize datacenters
and clouds today and in the future.
Key XenServer benefits
Cloud-proven virtualization that is used by the world’s largest clouds, directly
integrates with Citrix CloudPlatform and Apache™ CloudStack™ and is built on an
open and resilient cloud architecture

Open source, community-driven virtualization from a strong community of

users, ecosystem partners and industry contributors that accelerates innovation,
feature richness and third-party integration

citrix.com
Citrix XenServer Product Overview 3

Value without compromise from a cost-effective and enterprise-ready cloud-

proven platform that is trusted to power the largest clouds and run mission-critical
applications and large-scale desktop virtualization deployments

Virtualize any infrastructure including clouds, servers and desktops, with a

proven, high-performance platform

What open source means to XenServer customers

Open source solutions are already driving innovation and capturing the
cloud market, rapidly outpacing proprietary software in cloud infrastructures.
Underpinning the evolution of XenServer for cloud enablement was the move to
make it fully open source. An open source XenServer aligns with the dominant
cloud orchestration platforms of Citrix CloudPlatform, Apache CloudStack and
OpenStack™—and meets the expectations of cloud builders for source code
availability, open APIs and ecosystem contribution and integration.

Customers benefit from a better XenServer product, a more comprehensive

feature set, direct product influence through user communities, early access to
features and code and better third-party integrations. Specifically, XenServer
customers receive:

• A commercially packaged and certified product. XenServer is rigorously

tested and includes certified product lifecycles and guaranteed support statements.

• Simple, automated patches and updates. The Citrix XenCenter

management console enables simple, automated, GUI-driven upgrades and
patch management.

• Citrix Premier Support: XenServer customers are provided unlimited

24/7 access to Citrix Premier Support for configuration and troubleshooting
assistance.

• Citrix Knowledge Center and MyAccount portal. Customers enjoy

complimentary access the Citrix Knowledge Center, where they can to obtain
information and tools for configuring, optimizing and troubleshooting their
XenServer environment.

Industry validated
Info-Tech Research Group recognized XenServer as a “champion” in its 2013
Server Virtualization Vendor Landscape report.1 Info-Tech defines a champion
as “offering excellent value,” “having a strong market presence” and acting as
“trend setters for the industry.” Info-Tech says, “Citrix provides a comprehensive
server virtualization solution that is scalable with a good consolidation ratio. It has
developed a strong solution with a focus on cloud infrastructure.” The report goes
on to say that XenServer is the value leader in the space, offering the broadest
feature set at the lowest cost.

citrix.com
Citrix XenServer Product Overview 4

Look closely at Citrix

as an alternative to
VMware. [Citrix] offers
many of the same
features as VMware
with more flexibility
and a lower price.

Info-Tech
Research Group

Figure 1 2013 Info-Tech Server Virtualization Vendor Landscape

Key features Citrix’s focus on

Cloud is unparalleled
Cloud ready by other vendors.
As a result, Citrix
XenServer is a cloud-proven virtualization platform used by the world’s leading public has become the
clouds across all major cloud orchestration platforms including CloudPlatform, go-to vendor when
looking at cloud-
Apache CloudStack and OpenStack. XenServer is cloud ready: designed for
ready solutions.
horizontal scale, cloud-scale performance, security, openness and simplicity.
Info-Tech
CloudPlatform integrations Research Group

XenServer includes security and scalability enhancements for cloud environments

and direct integrations with CloudPlatform, Apache CloudStack and OpenStack.

Resilient architecture

XenServer is designed with an agile, fully replicated architecture that implements

a master/slave model, where any slave can become a master with no loss of
functionality or configuration. This architecture enables cloud builders to cluster
hosts without incurring any additional configuration or management complexity.

citrix.com
Citrix XenServer Product Overview 5

Network isolation and protection

XenServer scales to 800 VLANs per pool, enabling cloud builders to provide
isolation between virtual machines (VMs) and users in a multi-tenant cloud
environment. Linux iptables firewall partitioning enables host segmentation,
while security and network spoofing and traffic sniffing tools prevent IP address
spoofing, denial of service attacks and session hijacking.

Strong open source heritage

Access to the source of technology is a key aspect of understanding and

managing the risk associated with selecting cloud solutions. Xen has been under
development for 10 years as an open source project, and is now part of the Linux
Foundation as the Xen Project under a GPLv2 license.
High-performance virtual infrastructure Citrix provides a
comprehensive server
XenServer provides a complete virtual infrastructure including a 64-bit hypervisor virtualization solution
that is scalable with
with live migration, centralized management for virtual machines and hosts and a a good consolidation
full complement of tools to get virtual environments up and running quickly. ratio. It has a strong
development
XenServer roadmap in cloud
infrastructure.
XenServer provides a highly reliable, available and secure open source
Fernando Bayuga Jr.
virtualization platform that offers near-native performance and best-in-class VM IT Manager
density. The solution takes just 10 minutes to install using an intuitive, wizard-driven WEC Health Unit
utility for easy server, storage and network setup.

XenCenter management

XenCenter provides all VM monitoring, management and general administration

functions through a single, intuitive interface. XenCenter is a highly available
management architecture with no single point of failure, as it shares all
management and configuration data across all servers in a resource pool without
the need for a separate database.

XenMotion

Citrix XenMotion eliminates the need for planned downtime to perform hardware
and software upgrades. It allows live, running VMs to be moved from one host to
another within a resource pool with no application or service outage.

XenServer Conversion Manager

XenServer Conversion Manager provides a simple batch conversion tool to

automate the process of converting VMware VMs into XenServer VMs.

citrix.com
Citrix XenServer Product Overview 6

Datacenter automation
Use XenServer to streamline critical tasks, maintain a manageable disaster
recovery plan, increase server performance and reduce power consumption.

High availability

Automatic restart capability allows IT teams to restart VMs if a failure occurs at

the VM, hypervisor or server level, and to bond network interfaces for network
redundancy. Auto restart helps protect virtualized applications and bring higher
levels of availability to the business.

Site recovery

Create a site-to-site disaster recovery plan for virtual environments. Site recovery
is easy to set up and fast to recover, and allows frequent testing to ensure disaster
recovery plans remain valid.

Host power management

Take advantage of embedded hardware features to lower datacenter electricity

consumption by dynamically consolidating VMs on fewer systems and then
powering off underutilized servers as demand for services fluctuates.

VM snapshots

Create snapshots of VMs to capture disk and metadata settings for backups,
archives and configuration changes.

Memory optimization

Reduce costs and improve application performance and protection by sharing

unused server memory among VMs on the host server.

XenMotion

Move live, running VMs and their associated virtual disk image within and across
resource pools, leveraging local and shared storage.
Advanced integration and management
XenServer optimizes computing resources with a deep integration between
physical and virtual resources that enables rapid provisioning, storage integration,
tiered access to VMs and granular management of virtual environments.

IntelliCache

Optimize XenServer for Citrix XenDesktop deployments by utilizing local storage for
boot images and non-persistent data.

Heterogeneous pools

Enable resource pools that contain host servers with different processor types
while fully supporting XenMotion, high availability and shared storage functionality.

citrix.com
 Citrix XenServer Product Overview 7

Role-based administration

Improve VM security by maintaining a tiered access structure with varying levels

of permissions.

Performance reporting and alerting

Receive immediate notification with historical reporting of VM performance for

rapid identification and diagnosis of fault or failure in the virtual infrastructure.

Notes
1. 2013 Info-Tech Vendor Landscape: Server Virtualization

Corporate Headquarters India Development Center Latin America Headquarters

Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA Bangalore, India Coral Gables, FL, USA

Silicon Valley Headquarters Online Division Headquarters UK Development Center

Santa Clara, CA, USA Santa Barbara, CA, USA Chalfont, United Kingdom

EMEA Headquarters Pacific Headquarters

Schaffhausen, Switzerland Hong Kong, China

About Citrix
Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) is the cloud company that enables mobile workstyles—empowering people to work and collaborate from anywhere, easily
and securely. With market-leading solutions for mobility, desktop virtualization, cloud networking, cloud platforms, collaboration and data sharing,
Citrix helps organizations achieve the speed and agility necessary to succeed in a mobile and dynamic world. Citrix products are in use at more
than 260,000 organizations and by over 100 million users globally. Annual revenue in 2012 was $2.59 billion. Learn more at www.citrix.com.

Copyright © 2013 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Citrix, XenServer, XenDesktop, XenMotion, XenCenter and CloudPlatform are
trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. and/or one of its subsidiaries, and may be registered in the U.S. and other countries. Other product and
company names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

0613/PDF citrix.com